Topologically protected subradiant cavity polaritons through linewidth narrowing enabled by dissipationless edge states

Abstract

Abstract Cavity polaritons derived from strong light–matter interaction provide a basis for efficient manipulation of quantum states via cavity field. Polaritons with narrow linewidth and long lifetime are appealing in applications, such as quantum sensing and storage. Here, we propose a prototypical arrangement to implement a whispering-gallery-mode resonator with one-dimensional topological atom mirror, which allows to boost the lifetime of cavity polaritons over an order of magnitude. This considerable enhancement attributes to the coupling of polaritonic states to dissipationless edge states protected by the topological bandgap of atom mirror that suppresses the leakage of cavity modes. When exceeding the width of Rabi splitting, topological bandgap can further reduce the dissipation from polaritonic states to bulk states, giving arise to subradiant cavity polaritons with extremely sharp linewidth. The resultant Rabi oscillation experiences decay rate lower than the free-space decay of a single quantum emitter. Inheriting from the topologically protected properties of edge states, the subradiance of cavity polaritons can be preserved in disordered atom mirror with moderate perturbations involving the atomic frequency, interaction strengths and location fluctuations. Our work opens up a new paradigm of topology-engineered quantum states with robust quantum coherence for future applications in quantum computing and network.